Thursday, July 17, 2008

Today’s passage tells us that we are to be “transformed.” As you no doubt know, the Greek word for transformation that is used here is “metamorphosis”. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with bugs understands this word, how a lowly caterpillar becomes a winged flower, a butterfly.

It “morphs”.

It changes.

And the idea is that so will we.

In other words, there is a before and after to our life story. In fact, in this life there is an ongoing series of before and afters where the latest “after” becomes the next before. In fact, that is what the Bible is—a collection of stories of how, through salvation history, God changes people, and therefore of how He both wants to and is able to change you. (And me, of course.) It’s the story of before and afters.

I’ve thought about this a lot the last several years, and I’ve come to believe that one of the surest marks of a healthy Christian community that really is centered on Jesus as Lord and Savior is that it will be a community of stories. These stories will be stories of lives changed by the power of God at work in them. They’ll be the kind of stories a person can’t help but tell, and they will encourage and inspire those who hear them to continue offering themselves as living sacrifices so that they will be transformed to a greater extent than ever before.

So… what is your story? What is mine? Do we have one? Are we telling it? How is God changing us, morphing us, delivering us from the pain of what was into the glory of what yet might be?